


captain's orders

by hupsoonheng



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Consent Issues, Foreplay, Hurt/Comfort, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-12
Updated: 2016-05-12
Packaged: 2018-06-07 22:40:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,271
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6828100
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hupsoonheng/pseuds/hupsoonheng
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>a birthday present for @notcuddles!</p><p>post-cw, without putting bucky back under. bucky wants to feel normal, wants things like they were in the good ol' days, but there's a lot going on in that head of his that other people put in there. (the consent issues tag is literally that consent issues are examined, not that there's any lack of consent given.)</p><p>"Bucky, get away from the door." There's something harder to Steve's voice this time. Bucky backs away from the door, no less tense, gun still raised—until Steve issues another order. "Put the gun down. Go into the kitchen." </p><p>So Bucky does.</p>
            </blockquote>





	captain's orders

**Author's Note:**

> happy 30th birthday kelsey!!!! you managed to get me to write stucky as my first mcu outing, congratulations. i still had to mention sam though
> 
> i still don't fully know how to tag this one or if the rating's even right but honestly i haven't posted to ao3 in so long, so
> 
> this is also my one outcry against woobified buckies, against buckies without even a vestige of his former personality, against "what's 'sex'?" buckies. let bucky be bucky

"Easy, Buck." Steve's voice is a warm knife through the paranoia that always comes with waking. "Easy." His hand on Bucky's bad shoulder is a light touch at first, firmer once Bucky knows it's him. "I got you." 

It's embarrassing to be babied like this. But it would be more embarrassing with anyone else, so if anyone has to help Bucky through being as much of a mess as he is, he's glad it's Steve. At least this time he didn't have a knife stashed near the bed. Steve made sure of that, even if there's still weapons in the apartment. 

"You up?" It's strange to look at Steve now, his hay blond hair dyed as dark as Bucky's. Blondes stick out too much in Mexico, even in a town as gringo-saturated as San Miguel de Allende. Bucky nods, wobbling as he sits up. This bullshit with his arm is going to take some adjustment. 

"Good." Steve claps him on the back, almost knocks his chair over as he stands. "I, uh, I bought breakfast from the lady down the street. I hope you like tamales." He says the last syllable like _leez_ and it strikes Bucky, not for the first time, how ridiculous it is that it's Steve who gets to go out and about, when his Spanish is clumsy if understandable, and Bucky can strike a Mexican twang on command. 

On command. With ease, that's better phrasing. 

The tamales are good and hot, but harder to eat with only one hand. He doesn't let Steve help him unwrap the damn thing, though, because if he can't even eat street food, well—anyway, he doesn't want help. He can get around the hideout okay, with its yellow stucco walls and twin beds draped with weavings by local artisans. It's nicer than most hideouts he's been in. 

When Steve finishes eating—because of course he finishes before Bucky, the bastard's got both hands at his disposal—he shrugs on a leather jacket and pulls on his boots. "I'm goin' out," he says, like he has every day for the past week. And every day, he's never said why. Not that Steve has to tell Bucky, he's not his goddamn mommy or heartsick wife, but it's not like Steve ever comes back with anything that seems worth the hours and hours he spends away from the place he can't leave. 

It's not like the two of them didn't give it a try. Steve isn't some salon artist or anything, doesn't know anything but the ol' military high and tight, but considering Zemo's frame job involved a wig, it's better than nothing. So he did it, with Bucky bent over the kitchen trash can while the clippers whirred, but when Bucky looked back at him, there was something pained in Steve's face that made him look right back at the garbage. Steve left him alone to clean up, saying something about needing to unclog the clippers. Whatever. He came back that night with dark brown hair dye for greying women, and Bucky put it in without talking to him. He told him it looked fake as hell, and Steve laughed. Made it feel like old times, for a second. 

Once Steve's gone for the day again, Bucky turns on the TV. He needs for there to be sound. Partially because he's lonely, partially because he's bored trapped in here all day, and partially because he's got guns to clean. Steve doesn't much care for his arsenal, and even if he won't say why out loud, Bucky's pretty sure he can guess. Something about looking less like James Buchanan Barnes, and looking more like the Winter Soldier. He thought the haircut might help. 

"Te extraño tanto," someone says on TV, sometimes, because soap operas are like bread and butter in this country. And it hitches him up, even though it's in another language, and the wording isn't exact. Bucky doesn't want to hear about _longing_. 

In all honesty, he fares better when Steve is around. Steve sees him getting hinky because he said the _furnace_ is on the fritz, and he tells Bucky to stop, to relax. So Bucky does. Spots him hunched under the window with a gun practically welded to his remaining hand, tells him to come eat dinner because harmless gringos renting an apartment on sabbatical don't do any of that, so Bucky does. 

And when Bucky wakes up slathered in icy sweat, mouth bleeding from where he bit the inside of his cheek to keep from screaming before he's even fully conscious, Steve tells him it's okay, tells him he can feel safe. So Bucky does, at least for the next few hours. 

Orders from the Captain, after all. Not just because they're orders, he always tells himself; this goes back farther than that. 

Bucky changes the channel, to some weird game show where the goals are incomprehensible and the talking goes too fast for him to follow if he's not paying attention. And he isn't, because this gun is in pieces in front of him, and because he's got to listen to the street. Just because Steve says they're safe doesn't mean he has to believe it after the sun rises. 

Steve comes home. Comes back, Bucky corrects himself. This is hardly a home. It's dark out, and all his guns are put away. Steve drops a stack of comic books in Spanish on the table with a slap, and throws Bucky a pointy paper bag that's full of books. Bucky pulls out the first one he touches, and snorts. "Lord of the Rings in Spanish?" 

"It's long," Steve says as he shrugs out of his jacket. He always smells different when he comes back, and he's pretty sure he knows why, despite Steve's predilection toward being alone in the loop. "Might keep you occupied for longer than half an hour." 

"Long doesn't mean good, Rogers," Bucky retorts, but he sets it aside on the coffee table and paws through the rest of them. "How are you paying for these, anyway?" 

"Don't worry about it." He sits down and kicks off his boots. Maybe Steve's got a job down here. Maybe at the bookstore, even. Bucky'd love to see that one. "I brought home food, too." 

"You ain't ever gonna cook me nothin'?" Bucky asks, stretching out on the couch. "After all the pies and casseroles my mom cooked for you." 

"I mean," Steve says with a laugh, "if you wanna be poisoned, I could try." 

Food tonight is enchiladas with rice, and Steve plates them up for them to eat on the couch. They watch soaps until bedtime, which has nothing to do with being tired and everything to do with turning the lights off at a normal, unnoticeable hour. There's only one bedroom, but two beds, pushed up against perpendicular walls in the far corner. Steve helps Bucky re-wrap his stump after he cleans it for the night, something he looks away from. He remembers, in scraps, the first time he lost his arm. 

It's far past midnight when there's a sound he doesn't like outside the window. It sounds like footsteps coming up the wall. It sounds like enemies. 

In a flash Bucky's armed, bare feet silent on the tile floor as he approaches the side of the window. His ears prick to hear how many hostiles are coming his way, but it's like they've paused their ascent just to fuck with him. But he won't be taken by surprise. He'll shoot them off the goddamn wall, and if they die when they hit bottom, it's not like he's the pavement killing them. Steve will understand. 

Except Steve is awake, too, and he eyes the gun in Bucky's hand warily. "How many?" he whispers. 

Bucky gnashes his teeth, still waiting for the fuckers outside to make even one move. Nothing. He shakes his head. 

So Steve slips out from under his woven blanket, pads to the window. He fucking looks, just straight out like he doesn't think someone might blow his heroic head right off. And no one does, either. In fact, when he pulls his head back in, he looks at Bucky with a frown. "All clear," he says, slow and cautious. "What did you—what did you hear?" Bucky wonders if that was just his lingering sometimes-stammer, or if there was some self-editing at work there. 

"Scaling the wall," Bucky mutters, still listening. He raises his gun, already cocked. 

"There's nobody there," Steve insists, but Bucky hasn't seen that for himself. He knows what he heard. And now he's thinking about the front door, too, and how vulnerable it is to any jackbooted foot kicking it down. He's got to go reinforce it. 

"Watch the window," he tells Steve, before slinking out of the room toward the front door. Steve does no such thing, following him instead; at least he's playing along and being quiet about his footsteps, even as he hisses at Bucky to come back to the bedroom. 

There's a knock at the door, and both men freeze. Bucky is immediately flat to the wall next to the doorjamb. A voice on the other side is asking something in Spanish. 

"Buck," Steve says, low and urgent. Bucky wishes he had his other hand to reach for the door knob, instead of waiting for the door to bust open. 

"Bucky." The voice outside is apologizing for knocking so late, but it's important. 

"Bucky, get away from the door." There's something harder to Steve's voice this time. Bucky backs away from the door, no less tense, gun still raised—until Steve issues another order. "Put the gun down. Go into the kitchen." 

So Bucky does. 

Steve opens the door once Bucky's out of the room, and no one bursts in, guns blazing or otherwise. Instead Steve listens intently to the knocker, with nods and little awkward chuckles, especially when he asks them to repeat what they said a little slower for his American ears. He bids whoever it is _buenas noches_ and closes the door. 

"It was the downstairs neighbors," Steve reports as he joins Bucky in the kitchen. "The husband. He just wanted to let us know our bathroom is leaking into theirs, and wanted to see if we'd left a tap running or leaking or something." 

Bucky doesn't reply. 

"Hey," Steve says, reaching for Bucky's gun. He lets him take it. "I get it. You're on high alert. You've been on high alert for years." 

Bucky slides his newly freed hand up the side of his face, massaging the stubbled skin. Every time he tries to think of something to reply with, he comes up short. Instead there's just a kind of numbness that settles into his tongue, a stiffness of the jaw. 

"C'mon, Buck." A thick hand tugs at his shoulder, and Steve leads him back to the bedroom. He sits Bucky back on his own bed, checks that he didn't pop a stitch while being a paranoid idiot, helps him ease down because his body is still a mess of tension that isn't helping anyone. 

Then he heads for his own bed, and Bucky can't help himself. "Steve." 

"Yeah?" He pauses, outlined by the street light filtering in through the busted up blinds. Still wears a shirt to bed even when his years of needing all the warmth he can get are long behind him. 

"Stay over here with me?" Bucky tries not to sound pathetic, and almost makes it, too. 

"What, like sit on the edge of the bed?" Which he does even as he says it, even though Bucky knows he's gotta know what you mean. Of all people, he knows Steve Rogers is far from innocent. 

"Don't make me ask for it right out, Rogers," Bucky says, turning his head to frown at the wall. "Asshole." 

Steve snorts, grabbing the bottom half of his face pensively. When he pulls his hand away, he says, "It's a twin bed." 

"Better a twin bed than a bed roll in a leaky tent." Bucky looks back up at Steve, knowing he looks more hopeful than he wants to. 

"I'll lay down with you," Steve concedes, and Bucky scoots closer to the wall to make room for him. He has to lie on the side of his remaining arm because he's not allowed to put pressure on his stump yet. 

The bed has never felt tinier, between the hugeness of both men and the pointiness of the stucco in front of Bucky's face. Steve's arm around him is chaste, staying well north of his waist with a loose hand dangling somewhere around his sternum. "You're gonna be okay, Bucky," Steve murmurs into the top of his spine. "I've got you." 

Bucky's almost content to fall asleep like this. He can believe he's safe with Captain goddamn America at his literal back, at least when he's woozy with the need to sleep. But—

"Steve," he croaks, just as Steve's breath is starting to slow. 

"Hm?" The response is sluggish and quiet. 

"What's holding you back?" 

That makes Steve sit up, looking down at Bucky as he props himself up with one arm. It gives Bucky the room to lie on his back, and he does, looking back up at Steve. "You're my friend, Bucky," Steve says, gently. 

"You can't just kiss a guy?" Bucky tries to laugh as he says it, like the idea that Steve doesn't see him that way anymore isn't infecting his brain and making it swell with too many emotions. Like maybe Steve pities him too much to think like that. Like maybe Steve sees him as broken, or like a child. Even just reflecting on the maybes makes it harder to keep up even this tiny smile. 

Steve swallows, looks somewhere over Bucky's head, which is just the spiky wall. "I don't think—"

"You don't miss what we had?" 

"Sam is down the street," Steve blurts out. "I know he should be somewhere else, but I didn't—and he didn't—" He swallows again. "I can't, Bucky. It's not right." 

"Is that the only reason?" Bucky wants to touch Steve's face, like he used to in the dark of the Captain's tent. "I gather things are kind of... Loosey goosey between you two." He didn't gather anything, actually, but it's his best guess knowing Steve, and watching him interact with Sam while they were on the run. 

"There wasn't time, before, to talk about these things with him." Steve doesn't really answer anything Bucky's said. 

"I asked you if it's the only reason." 

Steve pauses, his eyes searching Bucky's. They look almost grey in this light, morning not far off even if it's still dark. "You said it yourself, Buck. There's a lot going on in that head of yours, stuff you don't even know is in there." 

"What's that supposed to mean?" His desire for Steve is starting to wane in the face of this conversation. 

"If you say yes to something," Steve says, "how do I know it's you that's saying it?" 

And there it is. Just like Bucky feared. He rolls back over onto his side, swallowing over and over as he glares at the wall. Steve is right, of course, because he always fucking is, he's so goddamn smart and righteous. Captain America to his core. 

"I'm asking you, right now," Bucky tells the wall, even though the mood has passed. "Me, James Buchanan fucking Barnes. Sergeant, at that," he adds. "I know who I am." 

"For now," Steve says, a little too quickly, and when Bucky redirects that glare his way he seems to know he should've kept a lid on that one. Silence passes between them, one minute, two minutes. Five. He almost can't stand that Steve is still over him, wonders if Steve realizes that it's the pose of someone aiming to kiss their bedmate. Not someone trying to convince the other that even a kiss would be immoral. 

"Fine." Steve breaks the silence, and Bucky rolls halfway onto his back, looking up with a quizzical face. "Just a little bit." 

Bucky lifts his one arm in embrace, and Steve descends into it. 

Kissing feels different than it used to. Of course Bucky isn't the clean-shaven young officer he was when he slipped under Captain Rogers' scratchy but clean blanket, bigger and shaggier than he ever was; and Steve is rusty at kissing. His mouth is open too wide, his tongue moves too fast, but Bucky puts his hand at the back of Steve's neck and says the words _slow down_ into the kiss. 

Instead Steve breaks away to kiss Bucky's neck, and a welcome warmth spreads from every kiss he plants—a warmth Bucky has almost forgotten feeling. Steve's thigh is thrust between both of Bucky's and Bucky can't help but grind against it, legs weakening with the relief it grants him. No one's touched him or his dick in such a long time, because the Winter Soldier was just a weapon to be used and put away. And Steve's hand is finding its old routine finally, tiptoeing down Bucky's torso toward the top of his sweats, fingertips nosing at the elastic. His hips rise to it. 

"You've always been a tease," Bucky gasps when Steve doesn't do much more than brush the base of his dick, fingers tangling in his pubic hair. Not that Steve isn't interested, by the weight of his erection pressing back against Bucky's thigh, but he's still cautious about it. 

"S'pose I could go faster," Steve tells Bucky's neck, and Bucky can feel the puffs of laughter against his skin, can feel Steve's wide grin. "It's almost daybreak." 

It's not Steve's fault. He never got to look at the book Zemo brought with him, never heard all the words, has only gotten them piecemeal from watching Bucky freeze at completely random words. And Bucky knows he's smart enough to jump over these stupid words, Bucky _wants_ to be that smart so this doesn't have to end, but the lizard part of his brain is sounding an alarm that floods everything else with its siren. 

Steve sighs as he withdraws his hand, as he sits up, as he swings his legs out to sit on the very edge of the mattress. He rests his elbows on his knees, steeples his fists together. "You alright?" he asks with a thick voice. 

Mostly Bucky hates himself; the moment has passed, with no following words to take him out of his head. He won't be ready to comply. He also knows he should hate the people who did this to him, but they're probably all fucking dead, so the hatred has to fall to him, logically. But he still forces himself to reply, to keep Steve from worrying more. "Yeah." 

Another long, heavy silence passes. 

"You still want me to lay down here?" Steve asks, with a little strangled note on that last word. He just wants to be so good for Bucky, which almost hurts more. 

And Bucky should say no, because it'll probably just be torture, and because he needs to learn how to be alone without being lonely now that he's Bucky Barnes again. But he says yes, because he doesn't want to learn any of that bullshit right now. So Steve slips back into place behind him, pressing up behind him with a strong, sexless embrace. Bucky reaches his hand up to cover Steve's, and Steve shifts his hand to hold Bucky's instead. 

"I'm with you," Steve says. 

He doesn't have to say the rest.


End file.
